A stunningly dishonest article in the New York Times attempts to rehabilitate Al Sharpton. The title, Al Sharpton, Reconsidered, reveals the goal of restoring Sharpton to polite company. It begins with an interview placing Sharpton in a grand setting:

Folded into a far corner of the Grand Havana Room, a private Midtown cigar club on the penthouse floor of 666 Fifth Avenue, Mr. Sharpton looked downright stately.

... the worst thing he's done: His loud support of Tawana Brawley, an African-American teenager whose claims of abuse and rape by a gang of white men turned out to be a hoax.

While his support for Brawley was bad – and even worse was his refusal to pay a judgment against himself for libel, absurdly claiming poverty and that he didn't even own the suits he wore – Sharpton has actual blood on his hands for provoking two fatal race riots in New York City.

In 1991, a three-day riot – actually a pogrom consisting of attacks on Jews by blacks – took place in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn, following a car accident in which:

... two children of Guyanese immigrants were accidentally struck by one of the cars in the motorcade of rebbe Menachem Mendel Schneerson, the leader of Chabad, a Jewish religious movement. One child died and the second was severely injured.

In its wake, several Jews were seriously injured and one Orthodox Jewish man was killed. Two weeks after the riot, a non-Jewish man was killed by a group of black men; some believed that the man had been mistaken for a Jew.

What fanned the riots were false claims that a Jewish-owned ambulance took away an injured Jew and left the black children behind. Tensions were further aggravated at a funeral for the dead child. City Journal reported:

At the funeral of Gavin Cato, banners commemorating the accident victim shared space with others that said things like "Hitler did not do the job," while Al Sharpton caricatured Jews as "diamond dealers." ...